Anarchism isn't really a valid practical stance. Once you burn down the existing system, something has to replace it, and, to my limited knowledge, that has always been a dictatorship of some kind. Maybe that's just the simplest government one can form. Similarly, collectivist organizations always seem to result in top-down totalitarian regimes when they win the government.

America worked because the original founders were willing to give up power even though the people wanted to make them kings. At the same time, they established a system that made it hard for any one person or group to quickly amass political power. It seems like the left have, for the past century, been successfully dismantling the separation of powers, starting with Woodrow Wilson.

Once people like that are in charge, it can take many generations for government to become more liberal (in the classical sense). When individual rights are lost, they are very hard to recover.

So anti-government-reguluation leads to a different flavor of fascism by corporate elites (all owned by the very wealthy).

Currently, the USA in an oligarchy and that power is actually vested in corporations who essentially control the government because they've infested all the regulation agencies.

The best way to fight that is with protests, strikes (there are dozens going on right now - tens of thousands at picket lines) and transparency (FOIAs and investigations to see where corporations control the government and vice-versa).

If the founders never understood the power of the uber-corporation, then they must've been blind. Dutch East India Company was a complete powerhouse in that era that controlled many countries.

But leftists vote Democratic (to the extent they vote for one of the two major parties), and I don't see the Democratic party doing anything whatever to rein in either big government or big business. In fact, these days the Democratic party is the party of big government and the Fortune 500, as is surely obvious.

Lots of activity, but little action forthcoming, I'm afraid.

But they will always want more.

I'm for small, local government and small business. And to get all the corporate money out of politics.

But the trend is always to go big, if the law allows. It seems to be very difficult to reverse that trend.

Substantially, that's a matter of history rather than ideology. Collectivist organizations that aren't top-down organized tend to be unsuccessful in overthrowing states and remaining in power in the face of more authoritarian opposition. The fact that the Russian revolution led to Stalinism is more survivorship bias than anything else.

You may also be underestimating the authoritarianism of right-wing institutions in US society just because they seem natural and normal to you.

“there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror."

So the ideology claims violent overthrow of government is needed, but it's not the ideology's fault when the overthrow leads to a murderous totalitarian regime arguably far worse than the government it replaced? I don't know how you can seriously hold this world view.